From K. Kris Hirst,
Your Guide to Archaeology.
FREE Newsletter. Sign Up Now!

Sadrettin Dural. 2007. Protecting Çatalhöyük: Memoir of an Archaeological Site Guard. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek, California. ISBN-10: 1-59874-050-4. 136 pages, some black and white photos, notes, bibliography, foreword and afterword by Ian Hodder, preface.

Insight from a Site Guard

It isn't often that archaeologists get a chance to hear how our audience interprets what we tell them about the past. If it happens at all, that sort of communication is a one-way street; we tell a story about our sites and cultural constructs, and, well, that's about it.

Protecting Çatalhöyük does that for us, in spades. Protecting Çatalhöyük is a book written by Sadrettin Dural, a local resident of the small Turkish town of Küçükköy, who for some years was a site guard and tour guide at the famous Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük. Dural worked at Çatalhöyük in the 1990s, before and during the first years of Ian Hodder's excavations at Çatalhöyük. That experience puts Dural in a unique place, having formed his opinions of Çatalhöyük before Hodder and his colleagues arrived; having spent time with Hodder and his colleagues learning about what archaeologists believe of the site; and having spent time with the tourists as they explore Çatalhöyük learning about what they believe about the site.

A Unique Viewpoint

For that reason alone, Protecting Çatalhöyük is interesting. The story is unique (in my experience at least), in that Dural describes what his life has been before, during and after his job at Çatalhöyük, how his personal life was changed by the experience, and even how his house has elements that are similar to structures discovered at the 9,500 year old archaeological site.

My favorite thing about this book is how it came to be. Nobody asked Dural to write this; he appears to be a natural diarist, so instead of being a treatise on "what I believe about Çatalhöyük" the reader gets a personalized window into Dural's life, into his feelings and thoughts about his village, his friends, the archaeologists who work on the site, the tourists that he guides through the site, and, oh yes, Çatalhöyük itself.

Sadrettin Dural and the "Other"

At the end of the book is included an interview of Dural by Ian Hodder. To quite frank, I found it a little offputting, because, oddly enough, it reminded me of Dural's "otherness". Perhaps I needed to be reminded, but the text does stand on its own merits. Interestingly, and probably because of the accessibility of Dural's memoir, Hodder comes across as the "other" during this interview. It's very possible archaeologists always are the "others", we just don't always admit it.

The moral of the story--if there needs to be one--is you should not be rude to site guards. They may be taking notes.